In the management of our relationship to God, it is God who manages, and He manages our choice-making without being in any way the author of our sin. The "cost" of believing that is that we don't always know -- especially in the case of others -- what mix of sinfulness and virtue there exists in particular deeds or failures to act.
For example, we can't measure what the Lord actually uses quantity-language to describe: the size of gifts. In Luke 21:1-4, Jesus uses quantity-language to praise the giving of a very small amount: "And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury. And He saw a poor widow putting in two small copper coins. And He said, 'Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all; for they all out of their surplus put into the offering; but she out of her poverty put in all that she had to live on.'”
This continues the perception of the doing of good (and sinning) that we brought up in looking at Mt 12:35 in the previous post. In both cases, the "good man" case, and the "evil man" case, we can see, at least some, of the "what" -- "what is good" and "what is evil" -- but we don't see the treasure, or which treasure it is.
Does everyone sin? Due to 1 Jn 1:8, we must all say we have sin, and (1 Jn 2:1), must also say the possibility of sinning still exists for us in this life. But Mt 12:35 leads to the conclusion that the good man does not have evil treasure, and the evil man does not have good treasure, but vice versa: the good man has good treasure, and the evil man has evil treasure. If the good man still sins (Eccl. 7:20), then not all our acts come from our treasure.
Depending on what we are looking for -- complete predictability by ourselves being the common, but mistaken (1 Cor 4:4-5) goal -- we would have to say that that the hiddenness of heart motive and the hiddenness of heart treasure prevent us from using behavior alone to assess the good of what looks fine on the outside. That takes care of assigning any degree of eternal good to our actions or others' based on behavior alone. What about the "what is evil" side? We certainly can identify at least some of the evil in what is evil. What we can't see is the treasure the person is holding inside, specifically, if a particular evil act (or evil aspect of any act) came from an evil treasure inside.
Another way of saying this is (using the language of Jesus about all sin Mt 15:19; Mk 7:21) that sin comes "out of the heart," but that the heart WILL go with what the treasure is (Mt 6:21; Lk 12:34) -- notice, future tense. So both Paul (Rm 7:14-25; Eph 4:13) and Jesus put the lining up of heart and treasure, as future.
